


The Lay of Mischka One-Leg

by maypop



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-03
Updated: 2011-04-03
Packaged: 2017-10-17 12:51:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/177033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maypop/pseuds/maypop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A dying soldier meets a vila in the woods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lay of Mischka One-Leg

**Author's Note:**

> There is an error in this fic! Don't tell me you I didn't tell you, I'll cry. Vila are not traditionally cannibalistic, but I wrote this on a plane unable to check my facts, so let's handwave it and say Mikhail comes from a village where the stories are a little different.

Mikhail met a vila in the woods.

He did not know she was a vila, at first; he blamed his wound. Without his wound, he would have known, and he would have run away, he was not stupid.

Though--well, it had to be said. It did not look _much_ like a vila, right then. Perhaps even vila needed to laundry, and wore whatever castoffs they had while their red lace and silver gilt dresses were scrubbed by dwarves. Perhaps. And with all the young men dead fighting Germans, it made sense they would be skinny.

She came on sniper silent feet through the pines and crouched, looking at him lying half in and half out of the stream. The coldness felt good on his wound.

He took the look for assessing, even then, though he had not thought he was being weighed like calf liver.

“That is a bad leg,” the vila said.

“Please,” he whispered.

“If you live, you will lose it,” she said. “You will be Mischka One-Leg your whole life, and there will be great pain, and children will laugh at you. Of course,” she reflected. “You do not shoot Germans with your toes. So do you wish to live, Mischka One-Leg?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Good,” the vila said. She walked around him, squatted, grabbed his belt, and dragged him up the bank without much care. “You will pass out soon,” she said to his grey face, and when she stooped to throw him over her shoulder his leg hit her back, and he did.

*

“You are lucky,” she said, and it was a testament to wartime that he agreed. “You were delirious when I took it off.”

Her face in the light of the fire was sharp edged and dark hollowed; she had held him down with the strength of a mountain and tied him to the bed like a butcher knotting twine. Mikhail remembered screams and a cut opening on her forearm that folded back together under his gaze.

“I know what you are,” he said.

“I think you probably do not,” the vila said. She went to the stove and came back with thin soup and dark bread. And well, what did she need to have human food around for? He was grateful for this much.

“I have eaten already,” she said. “You will eat that and you will not throw it up.”

“You ate it,” he said around a mouthful of dry bread, and when she gave a birdlike twitch he nodded to the red-soaked towels knotted around the stump.

“--In a way,” she said. “That is very true.” The vila looked pensive. He swallowed.

“It is okay,” he said. The vila stood up and began tidying the small cottage he lay in. A heap of rags fell with a damp sound into the washing pail. “I do not begrudge you. We are what we are. Only--”

“Only what, Mischka One-Leg?”

“You have a bit of,” he moved his hand towards his forehead, where a long swipe of red crossed her eyebrow. “You have a bit of me, here.”

*

He was not sure how long he lay in the bed, while the vila came and went in her army castoffs. Distantly it pleased him that good Belorussian fairies did not put on pretty shows with Germans in the area. This deep in the woods even the day was not bright, and frequently the fever took him in its hot hands and pulled him into the dark.

She did not talk, though she swore at the stove, and once he heard her sing. It was only a small song, the kind to make the washing go faster, one about home and warmth and fat chickens, but such was her vila magic that his throat closed up anyway. Mikhail watched her delicate wrists sliding into the soapy water and was glad when darkness swallowed him again.

The next day she came in with a crude wooden crutch and demanded he do laps around the cabin while she went about her business.

He wobbled and the world heaved under his foot, but the stick was stout and the vila’s eyes piercing, and he stood. “What do you want from me?” he said.

“Twenty laps,” she said, before she left for the day. “And get your own soup. It’s on the stove.”

“What do you want from me?” Mikhail said again, when the shadows had begun to meet in the middle of the room and the vila came back.

“To be quiet.”

“I have no sons,” he said. “And no wealth. And feats of bravery are a healthy man’s game.”

She crossed the room to the bed and flicked his knee about the bandages. Echoes of pain made his teeth clench. “I want you to stop bleeding,” she said, and he felt shamed, like a baker cooling his wares in front of a beggar.

“Stop bleeding,” the vila said, “And I will set you a mission.”

That night she spoke to voices under the floor, and for all his bravery in the face of German’s guns and vila’s teeth, he hoped he would survive it. There was a war on, after all.

*

“This is not what I expected,” Mikhail said, and ran his hands up and down the barrel of the rifle. “Couldn’t you just magic the Germans away?”

“My _magic_ ,” the vila said, and spat to the side. In sunlight her hair was blinding, and her eyes as warm as a fistful of shell casings. “My magic convinces boys and girls to die for me. If I want Huns out of my forest, I must shoot them like everyone else.”

“Still,” Mikhail said. He sighted down the barrel. He’d become good with the crutch, and the dark no longer pulled at him when he touched the stump. The walk to the top of the hill had drained him, though, and his arms were weak. He set the rifle down and rubbed his bicep, digging the knuckles in.

“Still,” she said. “Still what, Mischka One Leg, an old vila may not love her forest?”

“I suppose,” he said. “And you do not look so old.”

“Be still,” she said. “Do not talk. Shoot anyone who makes it past the line.” The vila paused. “You may die,” she said.

Mikhail settled himself against a stump, high enough he could rest his back on it, laying out the crutch and the bag of shells and the rifle across his knees. He looked up at the vila. Her bones pressed hard against the skin, and her eyes were hungry.

“Yes,” he said. “Well. Yes.”

The vila looked down at him for a moment. Then she nodded once and trotted down the hill, a pale sliver in oversized clothing, hair caught in two tight fists to her head.

From the hill he could see the whole valley clearly, and as the sun rose higher and higher, he saw them come out of the forest, one by one. Men in ragged uniforms slipping out of the trees to stand around their vila, who snarled and struck out with the butt of her rifle when someone tried to stand in front of her.

The sun slipped up an inch, and burned the back of his neck. The vila dropped to her knees and braced the gun and shot before any of the men around her moved.

Mikhail watched the Germans come out of the woods. He watched the ragged men tear into them like jagged broken teeth, with mismatched arms and utter desperation and the vila’s screams of fury. They fought like hard and desperate men, and she fought like a rabid bear.

A German broke through the line. He lifted his rifle and shot and missed; he reloaded and took him in the throat and looked back for the vila.

She dropped the rifle and pulled long knives from her boots. The man in front of her shied and she dove at him, sinking the knife into his torso and yanking up. Then he was down and she was stepping on him to get to the next.

Another German, and another. He took one in the leg and let one of the forest men cave the back of his head in with a rifle. The other fell back, his chest blown open. Mikhail reloaded, and he watched.

Mikhail could see everything, and he saw the demon step out of the forest. He was paler than fresh water ice, and he was smiling. The vila spun like a weathervane at the first crack of his pistol, knives and forearms soaked in gore. Mikhail lifted his rifle to his shoulder.

She flipped one of her knives and dove forward. The vila and the demon came towards each other like fire through wheat. In the middle of the field she met the laughing creature and he dodged her, holding up his hands. Mikhail watched him speak through his scope.

A dead man fell against the demon’s back and he stumbled, the vila throwing herself forward in a flash of knives. The demon was sickeningly quick, though, and jerked out of the way. She fell forward, and the demon brought his pistol down on the back of her head. Mikhail fired and fired and fired and the demon looked up towards his hill.

Later Mikhail would swear he could see the demon’s teeth. The demon lifted the vila onto his back and started to walk away from the battle.

The forest men were falling, or fighting for their lives. No one went after him.

Mikhail grabbed his crutch. It is faster to go down a hill than up it, but significantly more painful. On the last few feet a vine caught his foot and threw him facefirst into the dirt. He landed on the crutch, and the sound it made as it snapped was as sickening as a bone cracking.

The bullets spilled into the grass, rolling in every direction while he grabbed, desperately, yanking up handfuls of soil and precious few bullets. He stuffed them into his pockets and grabbed for the rifle, the rifle, thank God solid metal all through, please God strong enough to hold him up.

The rifle held. Mikhail dragged himself through the woods around the edge of the field, praying to anything that might listen that his vila was not dead, and the demon was only quick, not strong enough to drag her for long.

Ice flashing between the trees. Mikhail stopped, trying make his dragging breaths silent. When the burning of his lungs dulled enough he wasn't forced to gulp, he crept forward.

The demon was whistling.

“You are a very unpleasant cockerel,” the vila said, in a grumpy, sleepy voice, and Mikhail closed his eyes for a moment. She lived.

“I'm the prettiest thing you're gonna be waking up to for a long fuckin' time,” the demon said.

“Then give me my knife back,” the vila said. “I do not need these eyes that much.”

Mikhail, moving very slowly, crept forward towards the clearing. When you are hungry, and you have been at war a long time, you develop strange fancies; and Mikhail kept thinking of the vila’s singing mouth going slack with death, and grain crushed under the weight of tanks, and the odd conviction that they were the same thing. The demon had to die, so the bread would rise, and the children would play in the river, and the vila had to live, or no farm would survive the frost.

He knew he had to be mad to have these thoughts. The vila sat propped against a tree, and the demon stood over her, pistol dangling at his side.

“Tell me where your sister is,” the demon said. “And I’ll make sure you go to a bunker where my brother won’t find you.”

“My sister flies with the night witches,” the vila said. “You cannot get at her.”

“ _Nachthexen_ ,” the demon snarled. Mikhail watched his hand clench on the pistol. He eased himself slowly down to the ground, down to lay on his stomach and prop the rifle against his shoulder.

“Soon they will land in Berlin,” the vila said, and gave a cracking laugh like something breaking. “Do not waste my time.”

Mikhail took aim, and as he did, his elbow came down and a twig snapped loudly into the quiet.

The demon moved faster than blinking, dragging her up and shoving the pistol into the vila’s neck before Mikhail could do more than curse his bad luck.

“Come out,” the demon said, Mikhail’s vila caught to his chest. Her empty hands opened and closed. The knives lay in a silvery pile several meters away. “Come out or she dies.”

“Shoot him,” the vila said. “Shoot him, shoot him right now, _if you disobey me I will follow you to Hell, Mischka One-Leg--_ ”

Her voice grabbed him, it wrapped hands around his brain, it licked like fire down the muscles of his arms _but if she died then the animals would get no grain and the children would be born dead--_

“Fuck this,” the demon said, and pulled the trigger with a sound like a world ending.

He stepped forward, dragging her limp body with him like a shield, and Mikhail took him in the eye. The demon screamed as he died.

The fell together into the leaf mulch, the vila's body leaning awkwardly, drunkenly on his. She stared sightlessly into the forest, her throat blown open. From her chin down was a red and gaping ruin.

The ground tore his stitches open when he crawled into the rocky little clearing, and he did not feel it. He tugged his vila's body away from the demon, and he rose on his stump and his remaining knee and brought the stock of the rifle down on the demon’s face, and his ribs, and his shins, over and over and over. His mind was an echoing silence where the vila would never sing to him again, and the forest was vast and cold around him. He hit the demon until things began to move beneath the skin, until there were little almost inaudible pops.

Mikhail dropped the rifle and turned toward the vila. She was crumpled on the ground like a pile of laundry, undignified in death.

He pulled her shoulders and head into his lap and brushed wisps of loosened hair off her face, and tugged her collar up to cover the ruin of her neck. It took several long seconds to understand why the strands stuck to his fingers. Her blood dripped down his thighs and he choked on bile, jamming his forearm into his mouth until the desire to throw up passed.

A fire would call attention, and a one legged man cannot dig a grave, and he did not know the traditions of her people, so, not knowing what do do, he held her in his lap and he sang for her. It was only a little song, about home and warmth and fat chickens, and without her magic it was very thin.

He sang it once, twice, and men came out of the forest into the little clearing. There were only a few left. The youngest of them stepped forward and touched her boot, soft and disbelieving. Together Mikhail and the boy sang it again, the vila's little song about home and warmth and _home_ and--

Her eyes opened, and Mikhail looked into them and straight through, like sunlight piercing clear water. The boy yelled out and stumbled back.

She drew a breath that rattled and caught, and another, deep gasping lungfuls, Mikhail finished the song.

“You see me,” Belarus said, in a voice still hoarse and cracked, looking up at him as he held her gently and carefully, in pride and wonder and terror.

“Yes,” Mikhail whispered.

*

“Win this war, Mischka One-Leg,” she said, days later, her clothes scrubbed mostly clean of blood. What remained of the forest men were going East, and he was going with them. “Fill my forest with living young men.”

“You’ll get fat,” Mikhail said. He leaned on his new stick, looking down at her scowling face. _Long and long and long ago a man who saw us could become a king,_ Belarus had said to him. _But that era is over._

“I will not.”

“Us old campaigners too tough for your tastes?”

“Gamy,” Belarus said without smiling. “And bland.”

“The next time I get shot I will make sure I have mustard in my pockets,” Mikhail said. “And if I live, you may have my dumbest son.”

“Go, Mischka One Leg,” she said. “I hope to never taste your bloodline again.”

**Author's Note:**

> The Night Witches were Soviet female fighter pilots that I love massively and uncontrollably. They flew to Berlin at the end of the war, but I timeskipped them a little because I wanted to talk about them. Again.


End file.
